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Towards a taxonomy of philosophical counselling
Abstract
As sympathetic outsiders trying to understand and explain the field of philosophical counselling to other (perhaps not so sympathetic) outsiders, we find ourselves repeatedly asking and being asked two questions: “What is philosophical counselling?” and “What is its relationship to psychological counselling?” In seeking to develop satisfactory answers to these questions, we present a taxonomy of philosophical counselling. This fourfold taxonomy was developed by classifying the work of a range of recognised philosophical counsellors in terms of their declared ends. This taxonomy makes sense of the diversity of the field, while also recognising the underlying coherence. Moreover, the categories of the taxonomy align with existing forms of psychological counselling practice, and in this way the taxonomy enables us to pinpoint the relationship between psychological and philosophical counselling. We end with some consideration of what philosophical counsellors can learn from their colleagues in psychology, especially in relation to the role of empathy and the importance of empirical testing.
Este livro nasce de uma inquietação persistente: a filosofia pode, de fato, ser uma ferramenta para enfrentar os desafios do dia a dia, ou ela está destinada a permanecer confinada às teorizações acadêmicas? Minha jornada no aconselhamento filosófico me mostrou que a filosofia não se limita a debates conceituais ou à análise de grandes sistemas de pensamento. Ela pode e deve ser aplicada à vida concreta, tornando-se um instrumento para quem busca compreender melhor suas escolhas e suas possibilidades, assim como seus conflitos.
A maneira como a filosofia é ensinada, muitas vezes, a distancia daquilo que lhe dá sentido. Nos cursos acadêmicos, é comum que a ênfase recaia sobre a história das ideias e sobre a erudição dos textos. Isso é importante, sem dúvida. No entanto, a filosofia sempre foi mais do que um inventário de conceitos. Desde Sócrates, seu papel tem sido provocar, desafiar e mover o pensamento na direção daquilo que escapa ao senso comum. Ainda assim, nem sempre fazemos um questionamento que é fundamental: como esses conceitos podem nos ajudar a viver melhor?
Há algo de profundamente enriquecedor no encontro entre diferentes perspectivas: de Platão a Nietzsche, de Spinoza a Foucault, cada um desses pensadores nos oferece uma peça do vasto quebra-cabeça que tentamos montar ao dar sentido à existência.
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools with the potential to revolutionize philosophical counseling. By harnessing their advanced natural language processing and reasoning capabilities, LLMs offer innovative solutions to overcome limitations inherent in traditional counseling approaches—such as counselor scarcity, difficulties in identifying mental health issues, subjective outcome assessment, and cultural adaptation challenges. In this study, we explore cutting‐edge technical strategies—including prompt engineering, fine‐tuning, and retrieval‐augmented generation—to integrate LLMs into the counseling process. Our analysis demonstrates that LLM-assisted systems can provide counselor recommendations, streamline session evaluations, broaden service accessibility, and improve cultural adaptation. We also critically examine challenges related to user trust, data privacy, and the inherent inability of current AI systems to genuinely understand or empathize. Overall, this work presents both theoretical insights and practical guidelines for the responsible development and deployment of AI-assisted philosophical counseling practices.
In this essay, I address the question of whether a clear-cut division of labor can be maintained between what a philosophical counselor attempts to accomplish in a counseling context and what a formally trained psychologist endeavors to bring about in the same context. The defense of this outlook proceeds by maintaining a bifurcated analysis between the philosophical problem implied by the client’s predicament and the cause of the client’s problem. Thus, the job of a philosophical counseling, so to speak, is to focus on the former, and the responsibility of a psychologist is to concentrate on the latter. Certainly, the intuition behind affirming this viewpoint has the tide of victory set in its favor. However, I strongly suspect that its apparent strength rests upon a confusion of what would qualify as an accurate philosophical statement implied by the client’s problem. In fact, I argue that any philosophical statement that correctly expresses the psychological predicament of the client is going to be related to what caused the client’s problem in the first place. Thus, I conclude that because of this link, a philosophical counselor cannot avoid psychologizing, to some extent, the predicaments of a client while practicing philosophical counseling.
When philosophers cultivate a professional interest in philosophical practice as a form of counseling therapy, the implicit bias of their practice is likely to emulate the “helping profession” model of client engagement. The effort seems noble enough, but emulating the model of the helping professions might actually be incommensurate with the philospher’s calling. The philosophical temperament emulates a less constraining but more aggressive model of intervention than we find operating in the professional domain of therapeutic counseling practices. While the philosophical temperament resolves to question and analyze its subject-matter without the encumbrances of social constraint or the promise of utility, it employs methods of philosophical questioning and analysis decidedly more agonistic than can be motivated under the auspices of the “helping profession” model of therapeutic intervention. The philosophical temperament is a challenging temperament, a probing, testing, exploring, engaging temperament whose only vested commitment is to further inquiry. After setting up this distinction between philosophical practice and the helping professions I pose some thoughts regarding the philosophical encounter within a counseling situation, with emphasis on the challenge of translating back and forth between the client’s subject matter and the philosopher’s frame of reference. In the course of negotiating these challenges, the philosophical temperament encounters two divergent paths we must learn to travel with equal facility: we must make room for beneficial critique in philosophical counseling while motivating effective critical perspective within the client’s own world-view. The challenge is to see such a philosophical encounter as a place of translation, in which the counselor’s philosophical temperament is exposed to the alterity of the client’s domain of experience without losing its critical facility. In this way, the philosophical encounter is exercised in a movement between worlds, as an interweaving dance of translation and innovation characteristic of a “place” of mutual engagement. The resulting tension in these dialogical encounters is a direct consequence of the philosophical intervention in a client’s personal life. The philosopher’s challenge is to negotiate carefully between two domains of translation (between the cognitive-emotive domain of lived-experience and the philosophical domain of conceptual thinking, reflective inquiry and critical analysis), and to establish connections between these domains to facilitate philosophical encounters in a space of shared listening.
This article examines four key metaphysical assumptions of LBT regarding human emotions, human fallibility, reality, and human freedom. By way of examining these assumptions it shows how the theory of LBT systematically integrates philosophy and logic into a cognitive-behavioral approach to philosophical practice.
Cambridge Core - Philosophy Texts - Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human - edited by R. J. Hollingdale
The main theme of this article is that an adequate understanding of the concept of wisdom enables philosophical counsellors to identify their proper tasks. The concept refers to a great number of cognitive and practical virtues, and philosophical counselling is a process where the counsellee's powers of virtue are examined and encouraged. This is often therapeutic in the sense that it enhances the counsellee's well-being.
Philosophical practice or counseling has been described as a cluster of methods for treating everyday problems and predicaments through philosophical means. Notwithstanding the variety of methods, philosophical counselors seem to share the following tenets: 1. The counselee is autonomous; 2. Philosophical counseling differs from psychological counseling and 3. Philosophical counseling is effective in solving predicaments. A critical examination shows these to be problematic at both theoretical and practical levels. As I believe that philosophical practice is a valuable contribution both to philosophy and to psychology, though not devoid of potential dangers and misuses, I suggest that philosophical counselors reconsider the theoretical and empirical validity of their tenets. Using my experience as a philosophical counselor, I attempt in this paper to contribute to this task while introducing the reader to what are, in my opinion, the main problems in the field.